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Valentine’s Day is a strange holiday, commercially concocted, smothered in chocolate and weighted with unrealistic expectations. By Saturday, there’s a good chance many of us will be feeling sugar shocked and somewhat jaded. That’s when Heart of the City, a Celebration of Soul steps in to remedy the situation. The show at the Scottish Rite Theater features old-school Texas R&B singer Bobby Patterson alongside Austin’s Tameca Jones, Dan Dyer and Nakia. The vocalists will be backed by a powerhouse seven-piece band helmed by prolific local musician and producer Adrian Quesada and featuring the Grupo Fantasma horns. The night is shaping up to be a full-tilt soul shakedown overflowing with genuine heart.

The event is the biggest annual fundraiser for the SIMS Foundation, a local nonprofit that has been supporting mental health in the Austin music community for 19 years. SIMS served more than 600 musician clients last year, providing sliding scale access to psychologists, psychiatrists and addiction recovery resources.

Quesada’s wife, Celeste Quesada, a successful event producer, served as the creative director for the show. Together, they decided to use soul as a theme for this year’s event, and the program consists primarily of richly orchestrated cover songs from the ’60s and ’70s. The Quesadas were drawn to soul for its ubiquitous influence on modern music.

“Soul is obviously music that came out of ’50s and ’60s gospel and R&B,” Adrian Quesada said on Sunday. “But almost six decades later, soul can be in hip-hop, soul can be in country, soul can be in rock ‘n’ roll.”

Dyer describes his own sound as country/folk/soul, and he agrees with Quesada. He’s been writing a lot of country songs lately, immersing himself in the western sounds of the ’70s, “where the bass lines start getting a little funkier and the music has a little more swing to it.”

“You can tell that they were listening to all the R&B and soul that everybody else was listening to” back then, Dyer said last week.

You’re not likely to hear the standards at this show. Adrian Quesada didn’t go the obvious route, avoiding songs that had been “done to death or (used) in a ton of TV commercials.” Instead he pulled obscure gems that crack and pop with the authenticity of the dusty old vinyl from which they were discovered. Songs by Aaron Neville, Bobby Bland, the Temptations, Shuggie Otis, the Isley Brothers and Aretha Franklin are included alongside originals from the singers.

This is the fifth year Adrian Quesada has worked with SIMS on this fundraiser, and he describes the organization as a great resource for the community. SIMS is working to combat the negative perceptions associated with mental health issues, but the lingering stigma prevents many artists from openly championing their experiences with the organization after the fact.

Nevertheless, to SIMS managing director Heather Alden, the impact on the community is obvious: “Musicians come up to us all the time and say ‘SIMS saved my life.’”

New chapter for the North Door

Texas soul great Barbara Lynn’s Saturday performance at the North Door opened a new chapter in the club’s history. The venue taped the live show for the first episode of Northdoor.tv, a new website and YouTube channel the club plans to launch in March. The motivation for the website was to broaden the club’s reach.

“We have an extremely diverse program, kind of an arthouse program here,” MJ Smith, one of the club’s owners, said last week. “We’re doing stuff all over the board, not just bands.”

The North Door is a small club, with a capacity of just 300 people, but the club owners say they think the content they produce has a larger audience than that. They’re trying to move their programming “outside the room.”

Located in the 501 Studios complex, the club space has a history as a film location that goes back 30 years. Building owner Richard Kooris runs a production company called Xopix. He said the space has enjoyed a long and varied use. It served as the interior locations for the 1981 Sissy Spacek film “Raggedy Man” and has been used for thousands of commercials. Austin legends such as Stevie Ray Vaughan and Willie Nelson shot music videos there, and the Austin Music Network originated in the building.

The room “was purposely built for video and audio,” Kooris said. “It’s a very well insulated room, it has lots of power, it has all the accouterments if you will of a shooting studio because that’s what it was for 30 years. It’s a lot easier to shoot good looking pictures and record great sound in a room like that than it is in a standard club.”

South by Southwest booked the club as the only official live-streaming venue for the 2014 festival, and club owners plan to live stream their own shows in the future. In addition to Lynn’s show on Saturday, the club is taping Denton garage band Bad Sports on Friday and the Heartless Bastards on Feb. 27.

Scam alert

After we ran a story last week on pay-to-play events cropping up around the South by Southwest Music Festival (and not affiliated with the official event), we were contacted by Fred Nelson, who owns the family-friendly South Austin restaurant Freddie’s Place. Nelson, who hosts a free open mic at the restaurant from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesdays, had received a few confusing emails from musicians. In one, a young artist from Sacramento, Calif., explained that he had already paid $250 for a 15-minute slot on the venue’s SXSW showcase and booked his round-trip ticket to Austin. He was concerned that he might not be able to access the venue as he is only 18 years old.

When a slightly savvier artist emailed the restaurant asking for information about the event promoter for his SXSW showcase, Nelson decided to investigate. He uncovered a flier for a showcase advertising set times for sale on an event called “Wednesday with Freddie” that was scheduled to take place during the regular open mic. The flier advertised a $250 15 minute “gold package” and a $150 8 minute “bronze package.” Nelson contacted the Austin Police Department. We forwarded the emails to our South by Southwest contacts, who say they are investigating.